Dr. Tanya McEachern

These are your beautiful, lovely Lungs. Most people know that they sit in your chest, and provide your body with oxygen, essential for life.

What many don’t know is that they’re also an essential detox organ, carrying carbon dioxide (waste) out of your body via your breath.

One of the things that I teach people to do in my practice is how to BREATHE.

Most people breathe with their chests, not with their bellies, making breathing more difficult, less effective, and resulting in less oxygen being circulated. This accelerates aging, keeps the body in fight or flight mode, and leads to foggy thinking.

Although the lungs are an essential detox organ, the only thing they should be detoxing is your breath. Lung conditions (asthma, chronic viral symptoms, allergies, etc.) can result when your body’s primary detox organs (liver, large intestine, kidneys) are not functioning optimally; the lungs start to pick up the slack. Read more about detoxing here.

In Chinese Medicine, the lungs have a HUGE immune function. They’re also the organ of grief, meaning they can experience a decrease in functioning when a person is grieving. Grief can be about many things – the loss of a loved one, pet, job, home, relationship, former self, freedom. Grief can be passed down through the generations if not properly coped with, and manifest as a lung condition.

Fall is the season of the lung. It’s organ pair is the large intestine, so fall is a perfect time to focus on cleansing these organs. Colon hydrotherapy can be very effective for this. The lungs open into the nose, hence the connection between gut, lungs, and chronic allergic symptoms (to foods, chemicals, and/or the environment like hay fever & cats).

Deep breathing has soothing effects on the nervous system, and simply changing the way you breathe can have a big effect on your physiology (you breathe around 20,000x per day). Panic attacks are a great example – they can often be avoided by deep breathing.

See my handouts section here to start changing your breathing & put your lungs in a better place to cope with the upcoming cold & flu season. Then head on over to the book an appointment page to begin a lung cleanse with me.